Difference between Physical and Logical Address in Operating System Nitish Agarwal The Crazy Programmer
In this article, we will study the two types of addresses in the operating system – Physical and Logical addresses and take a look at the differences between the two of them. How do we define an address? In layman language, an address is used to uniquely identify a location in the computer memory. The two types of addresses also bear the same qualities and store addresses in a slightly different manner which we will study subsequently. There are two main components of a computer system – the Control Unit (CU) and the Memory Unit (MU). CU is responsible for input and output operations while MU is responsible for processing and storing instructions and data. The logical address is generated by the CPU and the physical address is generated by MU. The physical address is the real location in the memory unit which is virtual to the user, i.e., the user cannot view the physical address. But the logical address is generated in the perspective of the execution of a program and is visible t